Recently Published Reviews

Ulrich Pfisterer’s Donatello und die Entdeckung der Stile 1430–1445 is the product of a talented scholar who, though working on well-tilled terrain, manages to unearth new material and to produce some very fruitful analyses. Amid a dazzling array of data and a cat’s cradle of intersecting proposals, the fundamental argument of the book—sometimes difficult to discern—concerns the ability of art to convey complex ideas. At stake is the intellectual status of the artist, in this case Donatello. This artist’s sculptures of the 1430s and early 1440s explicitly reveal, Pfisterer contends, a successful struggle to make visible certain concepts current in… Full Review

James Elkins’s book The Domain of Images is an argument for extending aesthetic inquiry beyond the conventional bounds of images that typically provide the focus for art-historical research. Elkins strives to look at the world of images rather than the pragmatic relation that images bear to the world, which he believe characterizes paintings and drawings. The book promotes a few iconoclastic attitudes, broadens some horizons, and seeks to make philosophers, art historians, and art critics more aware of the present ferment in approaches to writing art history. In other words, despite Elkins’s explicit refusal to attend to the normative dimensions… Full Review

That most Chicagoans who have encountered Dan Peterman’s work have done so without knowing it seems as fitting a tribute to the artist’s ambitions as does the current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA). Indeed, as much as I enjoyed seeing Plastic Economies, I have equally enjoyed using Peterman’s installation Chicago Ground Cover (1997)— without realizing it was an installation—while learning to samba, salsa, shimmy, and shake atop the smooth surface during classes held by Grant Park’s SummerDance program. The highly functional exterior dance floor, made of reprocessed, postconsumer plastic, extends Peterman’s earlier, gallery-based project, Ground… Full Review

Shortly before I visited the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago to see the exhibition Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte”, an art historian friend in Berlin wrote me, asking if the show was traveling to Europe. The answer is no, and visitors to the exhibition are told the reason why: in 1958, a fire broke out at New York’s Museum of Modern Art while A Sunday on La Grande Jatte was on display there. Though Georges Seurat’s canvas was unharmed, the Art Institute decided that the painting would never again be lent. That absolute stipulation… Full Review

The title of this volume of essays on illustrated manuscripts in the Wellcome Library, London, says more than editor Nigel Allan may have intended. The notion of gems plucked from an exoticized Orient, replete with objects there for the taking, fills colonialist—and, to build on the title, Orientalist—fantasy, including that of Sir Henry Wellcome, who founded the pharmaceutical company that bears his name and who built the collection. The Wellcome Library, a center for the history and understanding of medicine, houses a splendid collection of manuscripts, both Western and Asian. It also maintains a continuing exhibition schedule at the library… Full Review

For several years now, the MIT Press has pursued a mission to acquaint English-language readers with the modern art and architecture of east-central Europe. With impressive dedication, MIT editor Roger Conover has sought experts living or born in the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia, and he has also brought forth exhibition catalogues and source readers authored in the United States. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of these efforts in expanding Slavic and Eastern European Studies, fields that have perennially been oriented to the study of literature and political history and closed to those not… Full Review

Many of us in the field of East Asian art history watched with curiosity, respect, and incredulity when the former National Museum of Korea in Gyeongbok Palace, Seoul, was imploded with fanfare in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of Korean liberation from Japanese occupation. The structure, erected in 1926 to house the Japanese Government-General, stood directly in front of the throne hall, symbol of Korean sovereignty. Even after its postwar conversion for use as the National Museum, the building’s inauspicious position and painful history were a national affront. Despite substantial practical and financial drawbacks, the structure was razed; such recent events… Full Review

It takes only a few minutes of reading to discover that A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV is a most unusual book. First, it is the product of close collaboration between a historian and an art historian. In this case “close” is not a cliché. John Elliott is a historian with an extraordinarily deep knowledge of and appreciation for art. Jonathan Brown is known for an approach to art history that eschews the abstractions of theory for exhaustive archival research aimed at contextualizing from cradle to grave—that is, from the networks of… Full Review

In this book Douglas Nickel explores the density of meaning and cultural significance in the photographs Francis Frith (1822–1898) took during three trips to the Middle East between 1856 and 1860. Nickel evaluates Frith’s images within the context of their production and reception: a short-lived but potent mid-Victorian configuration of aesthetics, conflicts between religious faith and scientific authority, moral improvement and photographic reproduction—all marshaled in support of Orientalist ideologies. In the introduction Nickel sets out his argument for a history of photographic meaning that emphasizes relationships between photographic discourse and broader patterns of Western thought; Frith’s coordinate in this field… Full Review

As the subtitle to Imagining Identity in New Spain indicates, Magali Carrera’s study of race, lineage, and the body in casta paintings and portraiture is much more than a strict art-historical analysis. Students of Latin American art, history, literature, and colonial studies, in particular, will find this book of interest. Carrera’s interdisciplinary approach integrates art history with social and political history and examines their relation through colonial theory. As she states early on, her aim is to consider how casta paintings and portraiture visually express the social and political constructions of the inhabitants of eighteenth-century New Spain. For the informed… Full Review

Anyone familiar with Joseph Leo Koerner’s book on Albrecht Dürer, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), will approach this new work with high expectations. The earlier one offered a philosophical, yet also poetic, interpretation of one of the best-known artists of the Northern Renaissance. With its powerfully articulated thesis—that Dürer’s self-portrait of 1500 was responsible for creating “the age of art”—supported by engaging, erudite, and convincing arguments, this book is a landmark in the historiography. Together with Erwin Panofsky’s monograph on this artist, The Moment of Self-Portraiture constitutes our contemporary understanding of… Full Review

Andrew Watsky is an extraordinary detective, solving the mystery of an exquisite lacquered wooden building hidden inside another older structure on a tiny island in Japan’s largest lake. In explaining how that jewellike hall came to Chikubushima, he provides an in-depth report on aesthetics, religion, politics, and patronage in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Kyoto as well as a thorough discussion of architecture, painting, lacquer, woodwork, and metalwork of that era. Because he treats the hall and its elaborate decorations as an “ensemble,” he is able to decode what has eluded Japanese scholars and visitors for centuries. Evidence on this building is… Full Review

This is a big book—an ambitious, wide-ranging, spirited, learned, and expansive book. It will be of interest to those scholars of Italian Renaissance art especially concerned with the emergence of the modern idea of the artist. In the manner of Michael Baxandall, Martin Kemp, and David Summers, among others, the author explores the lexicon of Renaissance art. Like David Cast, Patricia Rubin, and Catherine Soussloff, Patricia Emison is concerned with the biography of the artist and its broad ramifications. In a similar vein, like Joseph Koerner, she is attentive to the artist’s self-representation. The author has read widely; her bibliography… Full Review

This book examines the use of architectural spolia in the early medieval church interiors of Rome. It begins with a narrative catalogue of some two-dozen churches and their spoliate components (focusing chiefly on columns and capitals) and then continues for another two hundred richly illustrated pages, laying out arguments both formal and interpretive about “the development, characteristics, and ideological or metaphorical significance of the new architectural practice of appropriation” (7). The author’s overarching argument is that in all cases where the fragments’ recycled status was visible in their new setting (usually by virtue of the heterogeneity of the pieces with… Full Review

This edited volume of essays attests to Classicists’ recent engagement with contemporary theory. Despite its foundations in empirical scholarship, the field of Classics has been advanced by feminist thought, along with poststructural critiques of vision and power. Not all Classicists have welcomed these developments, of course, and theory per se still rouses suspicions of trendiness and contributes to a general decline in the discipline, according to those with little patience for the challenges launched by these studies. Some literary scholars have embraced theoretical methods for the study of intertextuality, for example, although Classical art historians and archaeologists as a group… Full Review